News & features
SIGIR 2009: Seeking Better Search
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Organizing threaded discussions. Using reasoning to rank answers on community sites. Predicting click-through rates for news queries. Assessing how crawl policies affect the effectiveness of Web search. Taking context into consideration when classifying…
Beijing Lab’s New Initiative: eHeritage
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Leonardo da Vinci and Filippo Brunelleschi resound through history as two of the guiding lights of the Italian Renaissance. Leonardo, of course, gifted us with the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, but…
Microsoft Research Asia’s Guo Discusses the Future of Graphics
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Microsoft Research Asia, celebrating its 10th anniversary, recently presented its annual Computing in the 21st Century academic symposium, held over two days, Nov. 4 in Beijing and Nov. 7 in Singapore. For the…
AutoCollage: Summarize Your Adventures with a Click
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research You’ve got photos—lots and lots of photos. Everybody does these days, thanks to the digital-photography revolution. Hundreds, thousands, a veritable treasure trove of image-based memories. Sometimes, though, you don’t need thousands of photos.…
Tweaking Channel Widths to Improve Wireless Communication
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research We’ve been spoiled. In this age of virtually instantaneous communication, we have developed a thirst for immediate access to information. Waiting is a pain in the Internet age. Soon is not sufficient; we…
Using Repeated Image Content to Render Photos More Efficiently
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research In these days of nearly ubiquitous access to digital cameras, and the consequent explosion of images available via the Internet, it has become more important than ever to find ways to render those…
Exploring Ways to Make Search Better than Ever
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Considering the ubiquitous use of search engines to guide users through the Internet, one might be excused for thinking that search functionality has been perfected and there is nothing yet to refine. Far…
Text-Search Tricks Speak Volumes in Image Search
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research It’s fair to assume that anyone who knows anything about the Web—anyone reading these words—is comfortably familiar with text search. It has become perhaps the pre-eminent way to extract information from the Internet,…
Microsoft Research Unveils Technologies to Improve the Web Experience
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research Battling search spam. Streamlining Web-page monitoring. Helping protect online privacy. Enabling the illiterate to use computers. These are just a few of the ways Microsoft Research is demonstrating its commitment to making the…